The procession left the Commercial Club at 2:30 that afternoon, moving slowly on foot to the soulful dirge and steady thump of muffled drums from the Rotary Club’s Boy’s Band. The impressive group of city officials, Boy Scouts, firing squad, veterans ...

Just shy of 19 years old and military enlistment recently expired, Kelly set out for adventures along the Upper Missouri River Valley. While staying at Fort Berthold and then Fort Buford in what is now North Dakota, Kelly’s inquisitive mind lead him to ...

By 1865, the Civil War was winding down and Kelly, who would turn 16 in July, could resist the lure of battle no longer. Kelly,now the eldest of four surviving children; Luther Sage (1849), William Dunham (1852), Anna Jeannette (1855) and Albert Frederick...

In the aftermath of the Battle of Little Big Horn in the Sioux War of 1876-1877, the Yellowstone River valley was bustling with activity. Gold had been found in the Black Hills, and there were multiple detachments of troops moving in both directions. One ...

In the mid-1870s, paddle boats could not always reach Fort Benton in the summer months after the level of the Missouri dropped. As a consequence, the trading post of Carroll was established 50+ miles downstream and became the starting point of the famous ...

When Luther Sage “Yellowstone” Kelly met Col. Nelson Miles for the first time, neither man had any idea that it would mark the birth of a life-long friendship. The twenty-seven-year-old Kelly, free spirit of the Trans-Missouri River frontier, ...

Unlike Luther Kelly’s initial meeting with Nelson Miles, we don’t know the time and place of Kelly’s first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though it would in all likelihood have to have been between 1884, which marked the first time TR ...